Outdoors: Deer hunting benefits us all

time for biologists and ethical hunters to help Massachusetts. In the process, they also need to help anti-hunters understand that healthy wildlife populations depend on sound, scientific management.

The Massachusetts bow season, which has significantly contributed to herd reduction since mid-October, ends quietly tomorrow. But the critical achievement of goal populations remains to be accomplished. Our much more effective and absolutely essential shotgun season begins Monday.

In the next couple weeks, our prolific whitetail herd, capable of bringing both joy and damage, will hopefully be reduced to healthy numbers, greatly benefiting them, our habitat, and us. We’re extremely fortunate to have enough local hunters to fill the role of missing predators so essential to our natural system.

Thousands of local freezers will shortly be filled with some of the most nutritious protein in the world, too, and our entire state will be much the safer for our hunters’ efforts.

Reduced deer collisions, diminished incidence of Lyme disease, and mitigated floral and habitat damage are all part of the underappreciated contribution of our local sportsmen. All these benefits are free to the Massachusetts taxpayer, though not so everywhere else.

Some parts of the country just don’t get it. Consider Princeton, New Jersey, spending nearly $60,000 to hire sharpshooters to eliminate a couple hundred deer from their town. Bowhunters from near and far would safely perform that service for free if allowed, all the while benefiting rather than draining the local economy.

Although Massachusetts has thousands of annual deer collisions, we don’t proportionately match much of the rest of the country, which perennially incurs nearly $2 billion in total damage. Deer guide Brian Post of Montrose, Pa., shared with me that his late mother — who never hunted — killed at least 20 deer just driving through town. His non-hunting sister was allegedly equally, if not more, effective.

Around the country, several thousand people will smash into a deer today. Towns that hinder deer management because of safety concerns just don’t have a grasp of the facts. Over a hundred Americans will die from deer collisions this year and tens of thousands will be hospitalized.

Those figures don’t even consider the number of people whose lives will be ruined from Lyme disease made more prevalent by overabundant deer. In Massachusetts alone, we have 4,000 new cases each year — often in towns that have put up impediments to sufficient deer hunting.

If you see deer hunters in the next few weeks, recognize them for the overwhelming benefits they provide. Their fluorescent orange is a bright spot in free community service. If you’re a landowner, consider offering an ethical sportsman a privileged opportunity to serve you, your land, and the rest of our community.

And if you’re a deer hunter, represent our tradition well, always putting safety first, obeying all laws, and discouraging any in our coterie from poaching, trashing, or trespassing. A handful of degenerates pretending to be one of us can hurt all true sportsmen and our great tradition, sometimes making us unwelcome even where we’re most needed.

Funding for monitoring chronic wasting disease in our deer herd will not be available in Massachusetts this season. Samples of brain and nerve tissue will consequently not be sought from sportsmen or deer processors this year.

However, if someone finds an individual animal displaying symptoms or behavior suggesting possible CWD or other serious condition, it will be tested at the Division’s expense. Up to now, our state herd has proven CWD-free.

Rhode Island has been attracting many Massachusetts deer hunters with their Sunday muzzle-loader season during the peak of the rut. Their success should be a guiding light leading to Sunday bow hunting on private land in Massachusetts, wherever landowners give written permission.

This future legislation seems a no-brainer, infringing on no one’s rights or safety. Let’s get this done. And while we’re at it, let’s make the shooting distance for bow hunters a sensible 250 feet away from dwellings rather than the 500 mandated for firearms.

The law as written prevents huge percentages of deer from being managed. If we truly want to solve deer overpopulation and damage, we can’t arbitrarily handcuff archers who could safely help.

Millbury’s Ed Stacy had a most successful hunt in Newfoundland, bringing home an 850-point cow moose and a 26-point woodland caribou. Ken Babineau of Sterling took a 480-pound antlerless bull in Maine, noting the most recent population estimates there are about 76,000.

Ken also took a huge 450-pound black bear there this year. He’d be extremely lucky to complete his New England Grand Slam, as deer populations there have been hammered by bad winters and coyote predation.